Different opponents, different venues and the same result. It has been a very arduous time for being a Sri Lankan cricket fan. But getting thrashed by a minnow ( Pardon! This word should not be used against Bangladesh anymore ) is not acceptable and mind you, this is Sri Lanka’s sixth straight loss in ODI cricket after following the whitewash in South Africa. So certainly there is something wrong with our setup.

Sloppy in the field

Everyone will agree with the fact that Pakistan team could be the worst fielding unit in the world by a distance. When Sri Lanka won the world cup in 1996, they were one of the best fielding units in the world. Upul Chandana, Roshan Mahanama lead the fielding unit. However, Sri Lanka team at the present is the worst not-the-best fielding unit. Even in the last night, we dropped a catch of the centurion.

No match winners

To be honest, I don’t think we have a genuine match winner apart from Angelo Mathews. Now he is injured, we don’t have that option as well. Yes, We have seen a couple of excellent performances by individuals. Thirimanne, Chandimal, Kusal Janith, Asela Gunaratne all are good performers and no doubt about their talents, but they failed when it comes to delivering continuously.

Post Sanga – Mahela era / Transition period

Sanga and Mahela were great ambassadors for Sri Lankan cricket for a long period of time. But we are forever in the transition period since their retirement. Individuals who have been identified as the replacements for Sanga and Mahela are failing continuously.

As Chandimal said in the post match conference, Sri Lanka can’t continue to use ‘Transition’ as an excuse for poor performance.

Wrong selections?

Honestly, I don’t think we are selecting our best players to the squad and the match. We have tried so many different players across all formats since 2015 and found only very few successful candidates.

Another point related to this could be that we don’t have specialist players for the different formats ( I’m quite not sure where we can put Thisara Perera, specialized pinch hitter may be? ), There are certain players who can play better T20 cricket than Test or ODI. But we tend to pick same team/ same set of players for all formats. The only exception was the last Australian tour, we picked ideal T20 players for the series and result was in our favor.

Politics / Domestic structure & First class cricket

This has been another hot topic for a very long time and nobody has a genuine plan / or solution for this. It’s no secret that the gap between first class cricket and test cricket is massive. Former captain Mahela had given a proposal for a domestic structure and apparently, it’s not gonna happen in this lifetime.